Self-writing around 1900 –
Fractured identities in New York City
Dissertation
zur Erlangung des philosophischen Doktorgrades
vorgelegt von Björn Klein aus Neuenkirchen
an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Göttingen 2017
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION – SELF-WRITING AS PRACTICE AND (DIS-)IDENTIFICATION 1
PART I 26
SELF-WRITING IN MEDICAL JOURNALS 26
1. INTRODUCTION 26
2. SEARCHING FOR RALPH WERTHER (RESEARCH STATUS) 30 2.1.MINDS THAT HAVE BEEN BROUGHT BACK - MENTALLY ILL AND HANDICAPPED (VOIDS/60S) 31 2.2.REPUBLICATION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE IN 1975(70S/80S/90S RESEARCH) 32 2.3.THINKING SEX WHILE STROLLING THROUGH THE PAST (RESEARCH STATUS/SINCE 2000) 34
3. SELF-WRITING AS AN ANDROGYNE 38
3.1.MOVING TO NEW YORK CITY –WHERE “ONE CAN LIVE AS NATURE DEMANDS” 43 3.2.CONFESSIONAL WRITINGS –PREPARATION OF A “SECONDARY PERSONALITY” 50 3.3.SEXOLOGICAL WRITING:“A PLAIN CHRONOLOGICAL STATEMENT OF FACTS” 60
4. CONCLUSION 70
PART II 72
SELF-WRITING IN JOURNALISM 72
1. INTRODUCTION 72
2. SOURCES –RESEARCH STATUS –PRESENT DAY RELEVANCE 80
3. SELF-WRITING AS A GIRL-STUNT REPORTER 84
3.1THE FREE AMERICAN GIRL CAUGHT BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY 86 3.2.BECOMING A “WOMAN JOURNALIST” IN NEW YORK CITY 94 3.3.WRITING ONESELF INTO THE MADHOUSE -“BEHIND ASYLUM BARS” 101 3.4.“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?”INSIDE THE MADHOUSE ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND 109
4. CONCLUSION 115
PART III 117
SELF-WRITING IN A FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY 117
1. INTRODUCTION 117
2. CONSTITUTING AN AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY THROUGH FICTION? 125
2.1.FIRST AECM REVIEWS FROM 1912/1913 125
2.2.AECM’S SECOND EDITION IN 1927 128
2.3.AECM’S THIRD EDITION IN 1948 130
3. SELF-WRITING AS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN MAN 131
3.1.JOHNSON’S PRACTICE OF WRITING BEFORE AECM 133
3.2.“MY NEW YORK WAS LIMITED”–SPACE AND PLACE IN AECM 141 3.3.FICTIONALIZED PASSING AND RACIALIZED KNOWLEDGES OF THE REAL 153
4. CONCLUSION 159
PART IV 161
SELF-WRITING IN DIARIES 161
1. INTRODUCTION 161
2. NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY, IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION 165
3. SELF-WRITING AS A WHITE MAN 170 3.1.“LOOKING UP INDIANS” FOR THE BRADLEY-MARTIN BALL 175 3.2.WELLING’S APPROPRIATION OF THE ‘NOBLE SAVAGE’ 179 3.3.WELLING’S AUTHENTIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL NEW ENGLAND INDIAN 184 3.4.THE NOBLE SAVAGES’ PARTNERING –WHITE IMAGES OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN NEW YORK 188
4. CONCLUSION 192
CONCLUSION 195
ABSTRACT 203
ARCHIVES 205
PRIMARY SOURCES 205
SECONDARY SOURCES 212
BINDING AGREEMENT 225
Introduction – Self-writing as practice and (dis-)identification
More than any other city New York is the American city. It is our imperial capital [...] In New York are the great publishing houses of books and magazines. There, more than in any other city and in the metropolitan area, live the men who write – those who write the books, who edit and direct the magazines. Of course, most of these writers and editors go to New York from the country and bring their country-bred culture. But New York refines it, stamps it as its own, nationalizes our culture – which still, for all the image and superscription of New York, is our national culture [...] Probably no other nation in the world is more closely in touch with its capital than is America with New York. Yet, to know America, a foreigner must leave New York; and, to know his country, the American must go there.1
The renowned journalist, writer, and newspaper editor William Allen White was a champion of small-town ideals and Middle America. In his 1937 article Imperial City, for one of the last editions of the popular magazine Literary Digest, – however – he crowns New York City as the real capital United States. Moreover, he thinks of New York City as the symbol of American individualism. Individualism in New York City – and in American culture in general – is a key concept – hence it is intertwined with what this study focuses on, identity, the self, and writing at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. In fact, the years around 1900 are what reshaped New York City into the symbol of American Individualism written about by White in 1937.
From the late 1880s onward, New York City changes rapidly becoming a city of moral contradictions. Jacob Riis photographed horrific scenes of New York slums for the Evening Sun. An abundance of reform societies surveilled the city and their agents’ persecuted indecent behavior, immorality, and vice, while slumming was at the same time advertised in popular guidebooks for tourists. Philanthropists organized numerous organizations to fight prostitution and pornography, and at the same time Margaret Sanger campaigned for contraception and the liberation of women. The gap between very poor and extremely rich New Yorkers grew along with a similar divide between the virtuous and the vulgar. No doubt New York City underwent various cultural, political, and economical changes that questioned people’s identities. Individualism around 1900 was intertwined with notions of democracy, freedom, and independence and as a consequence it affected relations to other citizens and non-citizens. This becomes vividly apparent with re-emerging and historically powerful specific American concepts of the self, as illustrated in various popular demands to it: self- determination, self-government, self-reliance, the self-made man, and self-sufficiency.
Individuality in faith and economics, for one, propelled a deep mistrust of external authorities,
1 William Allen White, “Imperial City,” The Literary Digest, October 16, 1937, 13–14.
like the state, for example – and as a consequence was intertwined with belonging – who was perceived fit to be included and excluded in the urban metropolis.
This was especially the case for economic individualism, shaped by the idea of a manifest destiny of going West, which produced a distinct frontier individualism. The market revolution, with its ensuing industrialization, materialized economic individualism in new ways in New York City around 1900. Race, class, age, religion, gender, and various other categories of difference defined individual identities for this reason. In 1896, for example, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision insured that individual identity was defined by race.2 Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Irish, and Jewish immigrants were the antithesis of American Individualism.
Republican individualism was associated with white men in particular. From this mélange, a distinctly urban American Individualism emerged – one that provided the necessity for the production of identity categories. This furthermore propelled various practices to understand, produce, reshape, devise, appropriate, and construct one’s identity. One of these practices was writing.
Topic and Questions
The following four chapters will analyze the practice of what I call self-writing, by which four individuals – Ralph Werther a self-described androgyne, as well as journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known as Nellie Bly, novelist James Weldon Johnson and social reformer Richard Ward Greene Welling – all wrote themselves in varying ways into being. I will focus on how their practice of writing shaped and transformed their self- identifications and, furthermore, what this can tell us on a macro-historical level about the understanding of identity and subjectivity in turn-of-the-century New York City in general.3 I will therefore analyze their practice of self-writing with an approach that is able to extrapolate the implicit knowledge of the everyday practices of the “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings,”4 and more specifically ask the two following questions: a) How has this everyday practice of self-writing shaped & informed the authors’
understanding of identity? And b) How were the presented self-identifications connected to established normative categories of differentiation around 1900 in New York City?
2 Felix Krämer and Nina Mackert, “Plessy Revisited, Skizzen dekonstruktivistischer Körpergeschichte(n) von den Vereinigten Staaten der Segregation,” in Verqueerte Verhältnisse, Intersektionale, Ökonomiekritische und strategische Interventionen, eds. AG Queer Studies (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2009), 66-81.
3 ‘Macro-historical level’ refers to the interplay between the practice of writing on a micro-historical level, and the efficacy of macro-historical discourse formations, like, for example, late-nineteenth century medico-legal discourse formations.
4 Theodore Schatzki, Social Practices, A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 89. Cited in Sven Reichardt, “Praxeologische Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine Diskussionsanregung,” Sozial. Geschichte 22, no.3 (2007): 44.
Writing was at the core of everyday life for these four writers in New York City. I argue that writing was, for these four writers, one of their practices in which they anticipate — partly realized — disseminated, repudiated and annihilated (im-)possible subject positions to varying degrees. Subject positions are understood here as socially idealized versions of categories like, for example, man and woman, by which hegemonic power relations are (re- )produced and dispersed. How then did people that did not fit into categories like male or female, black or white, come to “know oneself” and what kind of “techniques of the self”5 were used in order to determine their identity? One of these techniques at the end of the late nineteenth century was the practice of writing. It was an important everyday practice of self- negotiation and introspection for the authors. More precisely, this thesis is interested in how their practices created possibilities to (dis-)identify with hegemonic subject positions. The notion of disidentification and with it the theoretical framework will be explained further below. Over the course of time, identities unfolded in and through the writer’s texts analyzed here; they were manifold and changing, sometimes rapidly changing, for example, from one gendered, racialized and classed identity and self-understanding to the other in only one paragraph, as we will see with the example of Ralph Werther’s The Autobiography of an Androgyne. In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the practice of writing seemed like an elaborated intellectual and political strategy to show what is missing in categories like black and white. With Nellie Bly’s three articles, Women Journalists, Women Behind Asylum Bars and Inside the Madhouse, the practice of writing was, by contrast, more related to the possibilities of gendered identities and their class relatedness. In Richard Ward Greene Welling’s unpublished diaries, the practice of writing was intertwined with an ethnic drag practice for a festive occasion at a high society ball that only lasted for one evening.
The practice of writing as a focus of interest may be manifold and extent to many perspectives. The practice theory approach is, for example, interested in the materiality of the tools used for certain practices. Different questions can be asked, such as: What kind of paper, journal, or notebook was used by the writer? Or, did the writer use a pen or a typewriter for that matter?6 This thesis, however, will focus on the relations between the writers’ perception of who they were, and how they made sense of themselves without having adequate subject positions to align to. In short, the overall anchors of this thesis are best described through
5 Michel Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1:
Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (The New Press: New York, 1997), 87.
6 Lucas Haasis and Constantin Rieske, Historische Praxeologie, Dimensionen vergangenen Handelns
(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015). See Haasis’ and Rieske’s exemplary introduction of eighteenth century seaman Johan Pohl’s writing exercises.
engagement with the following three points of interest: the practice of writing, the aligning of subjectivation processes, and making of oneself in New York City. There are many other practices that the authors used. Focusing on the practice of writing allows for the inclusion of others practices in their representation as well. Mainly, this study will focus on their testimonies as to their views on impersonation, passing, cross- and ethnic-dressing practices.
The practice of writing as analyzed here spans mainly from 1887 to 1911. Werther’s Autobiography, although published in 1918 in the New York Medico-Legal Journal, was written in 1899; Bly’s articles were written and published in the New York World newspaper in 1887; Johnson wrote his novel from 1905–1911, and it was published by Sherman, French
& Company in 1912; and Welling’s diary entries were written in 1897, though they were never intended for publication. The writers chosen for this study do not fit into any easily recognizable group, or for that matter categorization. But, rather than focusing on, for example, African American authors in isolation, or on so-called women journalists, androgynes, or social reformers as a distinct group of people prior to the last turn-of-the- century in New York City and asking how they governed themselves, I have chosen four authors that share at first glance no similarities whatsoever apart from two facts: first, they reflected identity formations through their practice of writing and second, their lives and writings were directed at and entangled with New York City, the City that had been perceived contemporarily as the writer’s city, a city where literature rose to the paramount art form.7 All of the above writers moved to New York City from various mid-sized cities or small towns in the United States. But they, thirdly, and most importantly, challenged a developing regime with codes and registers that consistently mapped people by “the congruence of place, class, labor, body and physiognomy, language, customs and (ethnic) identity.”8 In other words, the authors presented here were part of what historians depicted as the changing environment in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Each one of them made a special effort through the practice of writing to assess the interplay between self-perception and the historical context in which they lived.
Timeframe
The four writer’s texts analyzed here were written in what was contemporarily and in its aftermath historically rendered as the Gilded Age and later the Progressive Era. Both eras were recognized as encompassing vast cultural and technological changes. Individuals were
7 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 147, 150, 151.
8 Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes, Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) XI.
confronted with these changes and dealt differently with them. The historical period of the Gilded Age was named after Mark Twain’s novel, which satirized the greed and political corruption of antebellum America.9 The title of Twain’s novel became synonymous with the middle portion of the Victorian era in Britain and the Belle Époque in France and was primarily associated with the time period from the 1870s to the late nineteenth century. In terms of writing, the Gilded Age saw a considerable tide of popular and social-scientific writing, whereas the Progressive Era was often characterized by reform-minded American journalism.10 Ballard C. Campbell described both eras as “a frenetic release of energy [which]
ran through the United States between the end of the Civil War (1865) and World War I (1917).”11 Both eras saw a dramatic, accelerated growth of industrialization; new forms of consumption emerged, and inventions like electric lighting, telephones, tube mail, and typewriters changed the landscape.12 While things and institutions that became important for the practice of writing like printed materials, libraries and universities proliferated, traditional beliefs of identity changed and were challenged. It was thus not only the physical world that changed. Perceptions of what people thought about themselves changed as well – or, to phrase it another way, how people could make sense of oneself in a rapidly changing world in the first place.
In contrast to an American modernity associated with and “conceived as identifiable, definite, and durable sets of concrete institutions, social actors, social movements, and coherent programs,” Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff have posited an idea of a fractured modernity.13 Their introduction to their edited volume Fractured Modernity furthermore singles out the fractured experiences and fractured histories of an American modernity, or, as Norbert Finzsch sums it up, “a multifaceted, incoherent whole, a ‘fractured’ landscape full of ruins of former times and permanently under construction.”14 Thinking of the modern landscape as fractured proves to be valuable for an inquiry into turn-of-the-century self-
9 Mark Twain, The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today (Chicago: American Publishing Company, 1873).
10 In relation to writing in the Gilded Age, muckraking was one key practice of attacking institutions and (political) leaders through this new form of journalism. The modern terminology is investigative journalism.
Authors like Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker, and the magazines McClure’s, Collier’s Weekly, and Munsey’s Magazine were amongst the most widely circulated and read. Muckraking magazines become popular and played a highly visible role during the Progressive period from the 1890s to the 1910s.
More often muckraking was understood as a Progressive Era practice, but with the example of Nellie Bly analyzed here the start of the muckraking journalism can be traced back to the 1880s.
11 Ballard C. Campbell, The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Wilmington: SR Books, 2000), XIV.
12 Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis, A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2004, [1989]).
13 Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff, Fractured Modernity, America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012).
14 Ibid., 2.
writing practice and subjectivation processes in New York City. Understanding modernity as
“components [that] recombine in varying ways in different places and situations and among different groups and movements”15 has consequences for the subjectivation processes analyzed here. I argue that starting with the notion of a fractured modernity, or, in other words, a modernity understood rather “as an attitude than a period of history,”16 can productively address the self-writing practices analyzed here without preconceiving what these people have done as modern. Just because the authors lived and published in a certain time period does not make a text or an author modern. In the texts analyzed here, the identities produced through the authors’ self-writing practices were unquestionably fractured – to varying degrees. They are ‘fractured’ in the sense that different identities were thoroughly thought through and elaborated in their works. Sometimes this meant changing from one identity to another in just one paragraph, revealing the fluidity of self-identifications. Starting with these deliberations helps in separating “claims to modernity from the social, cultural, and political arrangements” 17 from the actual practices and subjectivation processes.
Hermeneutically, this thesis addresses in this way what Michel Foucault called “a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.”18 Applying the image of a fractured modernity and moving away from historical monolithic bloc of understanding American modernity as a distinctive period of history as a result, then, questions the underlying identities that were negotiated in the texts analyzed here. It furthermore puts into question and focuses, thus, on a mode of relating to a reality that was contemporarily shaped through racialized, gendered, and classed subjectivation processes, as we will see in the following chapters.
Subjectivity and Identity
The concept of the subject has a long history rooted in the modern era of philosophy starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophical approaches in this era were focused on the subject as a pivotal figure of political, economical, and religious ideas and thoughts. With, for example, René Descartes, but also with German Idealism as propelled by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the subject was thought of as an entity of self-consciousness and self-reflection. Within social philosophical strains, as well as in moral philosophical thoughts, the subject was understood as a single agent and irreducible starting point for social theory, as
15 Welskopp, Fractured Modernity, 12.
16 Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” XXXI.
17 Welskopp, Fractured Modernity, 13.
18 Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” XXXI.
exemplified by Smith, Hume, and J. S. Mills. Romantic deliberations about the subject were then again defined as the place of expression of an inner core – an individual expression interacting with external forces. English and German Romanticism stimulated the transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, amongst others in the United States, to find their own spaces of inscription. These American transcendentalists in the nineteenth century argued that there is an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical and empirical, as seen in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and Song of Myself, or in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden most prominently, both adapting “the quest of the introspective seeker to the landscapes, both rural and urban, of the American Republic in crisis and transformation.”19
In contrast to long philosophical and poetical engagement with human subjectivity, the shaping of the concept and term identity is of a more recent date. The concept of identity in question here was born within a specific Western medico-legal concept of ordering, categorizing, numbering and counting.20 Thus the term is an answer to the problem of the classic semantics of the subject: “From the moment, in which since the mid-nineteenth century with Marx, Comte, Nietzsche, Weber and others the semantics of an intrinsic dynamic and irreducible sociality was developed, a classic social scientific question arose – the question of the interrelatedness between ‘society’ and ‘individuals,’ if one perpetuates to think these terms in the subject-philosophical tradition, bound to an autonomy postulate. [BK]”21 By analyzing the practice of self-writing of turn-of-the-century authors in New York City, one can thus see the changes of the possibilities of becoming an individual in actu. It shows how
‘fragmented and fractured’ identities were created in the late nineteenth century and, furthermore, how they came to be “constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions.”22
19 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 100.
20 Andreas Reckwitz’s understanding of the concept of identity refers to an even earlier date, stressing the importance of the shaping of the academic disciplines of psychology and sociology from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Alexander Reckwitz, “Subjekt/Identität, Die Produktion und Subversion des Individuums,” in
Poststrukturalistische Sozialwissenschaften, eds. Stephan Moebius and Andreas Reckwitz (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2008), 76.
21 Reckwitz, “Subjekt/Identität,” 2008, 76. “Diskurstheoretisch antwortet der Begriff jedoch auf ein Problem der klassischen Semantik des Subjekts: In dem Moment, in dem seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts mit Marx, Comte, Nietzsche, Weber und anderen Autoren Semantiken eigendynamischer, irreduzibler Gesellschaftlichkeit entwickelt werden, ergibt sich als klassische sozialwissenschaftliche Problemstellung die Frage nach der Konfrontation dieser ‘Gesellschaft’ mit den ‘Individuen,’ wenn man diese weiterhin in der
subjektphilosophischen Tradition denkt und an das Autonomiepostulat koppelt.”
22 Stuart Hall, “Introduction, Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 4.
[I]dentities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might present ourselves.23
In Questioning Cultural Identity, an edited volume by Paul du Gay and Stuart Hall from which this quote comes, Hall not only insists on the processes of becoming in which identities are constantly shaped, but, furthermore, asks who, then, needs identities in the first place. In the edited volume’s introduction, Hall posits the question of why there was a discursive explosion around the concept of identity in the 1990s and, if that being so, why one should bother to carry on with the discussion between essentialist and constructivist schools of thought. His answer is an assessment of deconstructivist critique in which ethnicized, racialized, and national concepts of cultural identities shared one distinctive feature: Previous key concepts of identities and subjects were put under erasure without replacing them with new concepts. This critical interrogation of deconstructivist thought and approaches has not lost its value in contemporary research and is important information for this historical analysis of late nineteenth century self-writing practices. It seems paradoxical to try to get rid of identities as Hall – referring to Derrida – writes, because as soon as we do so, we are already caught in thinking about and in identities: “The line which cancels them, paradoxically permits them to go on being read.”24 As a consequence, his proposal was that writing about identities has always been a practice that allows focusing on the spaces between. This space between will be here the focus on the practice of writing; the practice that at once shapes and dissolves identity markers. The figure of thought brought up by Hall was the Foucauldian theory of the decentered subject, an approach that does not refer to the classic semantics of the subject with an irreducible inner core any longer. This approach no longer aims for an all- knowing subject, but rather takes into question the discursive and non-discursive practices that produce meaning. By focusing on these practices, the transcendental, all-knowing Cartesian subject only takes up a subordinate function. For a historical approach engaged with identities and subject processes, new questions arise: The first priority is no longer asking for genealogy or ancestry, but rather asking what the persons in question could be in the first place, how they have been represented, and how their practices shaped their self-making.
The subjectivation processes as analyzed here via late-nineteenth century self-writing practices is thus interested in the complex relations and modes between autonomy and heteronomy of the writers. Having said that, subjectivation – as understood here – relates not to a linear process of subjugation, but to a process that is able to extrapolate how people were able to become an individual through forging various identities within and through their
23 Hall, “Introduction, Who needs ‘Identity’?,” 4.
24 Ibid., 1.
works. Heteronomy and autonomy thus, in this case, means to focus on the burgeoning medical discourse in the late nineteenth century. What Foucault called the power of a truth regime at work was shaped through the efficacy of medical discourse.25 A truth regime was created and dispersed, for example, by invoking the naturalness of the categories man and woman, black and white, abled and disabled, normal and abnormal, to name a few binary differentiations that come into focus here. Questioning a truth regime, then, as the four writers did in distinctive ways, meant to question the truth of oneself. People in late-nineteenth- century New York City could no longer be sure of the ability to speak truthfully about themselves, and hold themselves accountable, for various reasons. One of the reasons was that medical-legal discourse proliferated “social divisions brought about in the name of madness, illness, and delinquency, along with their effects on the constitution of a rational and normal subject.”26 As a consequence, to speak truthfully about oneself was thus tied to self- identifying with what were deemed normal and rational subject positions, such as, for example, man or woman. Through medical-scientific discourses in the late nineteenth century, in addition, classes and categorizations of people gained an efficacy that Ian Hacking understood as the practice of making up people.27 The list of people that were made up was long – a whole apparatus of people was invented and an inventory of ever more refined groups and subgroups of people emerged. Mad, insane, homo- and heterosexual, inverts, and androgynes, for example, emerged as classifications. However, this did not mean that people who were described, categorized, and classified in these ways were not around before. But, as Hacking furthermore argued, in late-nineteenth-century United States medical discourse, a statistics of deviance culminated, and with it a ‘dynamic nominalism’ producing ever more identity categorizations were established. Unquestionably, and emblematically, the making of the homo- and heterosexual divide, for example, as distinct identity categories, did not mean that there was no same sex, or different sex activities before it, but naming them as such, especially through medical scientific conceptions, articles, conferences, practices, and inventions, a shift from same-sex activities to same-sex people did indeed emerge. By making up ever more precise conceptions of sexual identities, as a consequence, new distinctions emerged. As soon as these distinctions emerged and were made up, new realities came into being. Each one of the self-writing practices as analyzed and exemplified here by the works of these four writers is intertwined with varying and highly diverse everyday realities. These realities thus shaped the relationships between their autonomy and heteronomy as a black
25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, an Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Foucault,
“Subjectivity and Truth,” 81–85.
26 Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” 88.
27 Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism, eds. T.L. Heller, M. Sosna, D.E.
Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).
writer, an androgyne, and a so-called woman journalist, as well as via the omission of naming and categorizing, as seen in the case of Richard Ward Greene Welling, a white Euro- American man. One way for them was, from different angles for each one of them, and with the use of different writing techniques, to write and, in the end, produce, different realities than the narrow ideas about subjectivity that circulated in their lifetime and they encountered.
What each one of them as a consequence achieved in the end and the text were able to represent was to question the limitations and possibilities of being in the world.
As a result, this did not mean that everybody resisted, or could resist these new distinctions, conceptions and classifications. It was not a simple and binary oppressor v.
oppressed narrative, but rather a more complex situation, as I will demonstrate in the four chapters. Self-writing as analyzed here was only one element of the constitution of subjects.
But as “subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts,”28 focusing on the self-writing practice offers a lens into how people (self-)identified and came to be constituted as individuals in the late-nineteenth-century in New York City. Above all, the self-writing practice substantially challenged – as put forth by the authors in different genres of writing diaries, articles, novels, and autobiographies – the ideas of how the writers were perceived.
They (dis-)identified with the given categories they were assigned to. In doing so, these writers told (non-)fictional stories that featured a constant rejection and adaption of scientific discourse and everyday assumptions of groups and individuals, that produced classes of people. Focusing on the subjectivation processes as produced through turn-of-the-century self-writing processes, then, entangles parts of the technique of individualizing and subjugating humans. Therefore, with a focus on the self-writings of the four authors in question here, it also becomes possible to observe the empowerment of subjects. Because, conversely, the invention of categories also shaped frameworks of possibilities, alternative doings, speech, and think acts. This becomes discernible by and within the self-writing practices seen here. This does not mean that people are solely forced into categories, but that self-writing practices always and constantly propelled an agency as well for the subject in question.
Disidentification
Hegemonic subject positions are idealized versions of subjects. These idealized versions circulate through different discursive fields, which were partly repudiated by and with the help of the self-writings of the authors. In other words, their narratives clashed against
28 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gardner (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 97.
socially constituted definitions and categorizations of individuals. The self-writing practice of all four writers is therefore – in addition – accompanied by a disidentificatory practice. As much as identities were shaped by this self-writing practice, identities-in-difference emerged.
José Esteban Muñoz understood disidentification as a process, as well as a practice and a survival strategy.29 A survival strategy in the sense that it propelled minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere. Werther, for example, as a self- perceived effeminate man had to confront phobic majoritarian public spheres without doubt.
Werther’s practice of writing, with its subsequent production of a male writer’s identity in his texts, can hardly be considered a minority subject practice. But, in relation to his other practices such as, for example, cruising through the streets and cross-dressing, it nonetheless was a survival strategy for him, because with his everyday practice he could contemplate, write and make sense of his self-perception. At first glance, he could do this within the confines of the Medico-Legal Journal, the same journal that helped to propel and shape distinct categorizations and binaries like normal and abnormal, hetero- and homosexual, and man and woman. Moreover, through his self-writing practice and the constant references to a writer’s identity in his texts, Werther questioned the late-nineteenth-century processes and principles of classification and intelligibility, which established a right to exist for those identities that were formed in response to the burgeoning cultural logics and logistics of heteronormativity.30 Binary categorizations of gender and sexuality – man and woman, homo- and heterosexual – were gaining traction through medical professionalization and its concurrent inventions of a natural order of disorders in the late-nineteenth-century.
In contrast to the self-writings of Werther, Bly, and Johnson, the diary entries of social reformer Richard Ward Greene Welling, in which he described his festive ethnic drag impersonation of a Native American leader for the Bradley Martin Ball, was much less a disidentification, as Muñoz understood it, but in the same manner brought to the foreground how people were made up, and thereby calls into question the efficacies and power structures of categories from a majoritarian subject position – that of a wealthy, white Euro-American man. The following chapters will thus analyze self-writing practices and how they shaped the authors’ (dis-)identifications. It will show how the practice of writing by the four writers interrogated and questioned modern epistemologies of what humans can be in general. The practice of self-writing thus calls into question, as outlined above, modes of subjectivation.
This, then, is associated with three other questions: First, how could writers in the late
29 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
30 Jonathan Ned Katz, “The Invention of Heterosexuality,” in Privilege, A Reader, eds. Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003), 83–98.
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in New York City relate to themselves? Second, and equally important for this question, then, is the writer’s relationship to New York City? Third, as every kind of identification is bound to other peoples’ lives as well, how did their identity constructions relate to the societal networks they found themselves in?
As mentioned, Muñoz discussed the difference that queers faced and inhabited as identities-in-difference. All of these identities-in-difference emerged from a failed interpellation within the dominant public sphere.31 In Muñoz’s approach this failure in aligning themselves to given subject positions, as for example man or woman, leads to
‘survival strategies.’32 With this approach, Werther’s survival strategy – as a person that had been perceived by society as an effeminate man – was the practice of writing. Although Muñoz’s approach also understands these survival strategies as being propelled by minority subjects, I argue that identities-in-difference are not solely an outcome of minority subject practices. As Muñoz pointed out there are complex relations between minority subjects and minority culture, which always leads to complex and contradictory relations between dominant and minority identifications. This theoretical starting point can be questioned productively when we look at complex historical figurations of, for example, a female impersonator that happened to be also a white, devout, and literate man. Focusing on self- writing practices thus can, as a consequence, combine two investigations of subjectivity processes; first, the failed appellations of a female impersonator in a male-dominated society, and second, Werther’s relationship to what Muñoz would call dominant identifications.
Nonetheless Werther surely had “to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere,”33 but was also as a historian posited “without doubt antifeminist.”34 Nellie Bly struggled to address herself as a so-called woman journalist. As there were not many women in 1880s journalism, women were understood first not for what they could do (write articles), or what their profession was, but were marked and categorized in gendered terms. The burgeoning gendered logics of late-nineteenth-century New York City deemed it improper for women to write. She had to negotiate her way into the male-dominated newspapers by sensationalizing her bodily emotions. James Weldon Johnson, started his professional career as a journalist and musical composer. But he was frustrated with both professions because they were limited in economical and creative liberties to address the problems of black identities in the United States. Johnson moved to New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century and became interested in other ways to write about black identity, therefore he went to Columbia
31 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 7.
32 Ibid., 4.
33 Ibid.
34 Joanne Meyerowitz, “Thinking Sex with an Androgyne,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2011): 100.
University to get an education under the tutelage of Brander Matthews in literature, and become what he named a ‘serious writer.’ Soon after enrolling at Columbia he started with his first novel project, which became The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Richard Ward Greene Welling was surely no minority subject in the way Muñoz understood this terminology. In the chapter on Welling’s self-writing practice, we can thus see the identity appropriation of what Muñoz might understand as a majority subject at work. But in questioning the practice of self-writing in conjunction with the emerging varying identities in the four works of the authors, it becomes discernable that these identities all emerged from failed interpellations.35The question then is: Are there necessarily more frequent failed interpellations when there are, as in the writers’ cases, no or very few options to identify with the historically specific subject positions of man and woman, black and white, abled or disabled? Along with this question, another question arises: Is it in the first place at all useful to think in terms of minority and majority subjects when analyzing subjectivity processes?
Difference
Self-writing practices shaped, as I argue, temporarily stable identities. How was this connected to categories of difference, such as class, race, gender, age, religion and (dis- )ability? Melissa Stein, for example, has examined the racialized and gendered scientific discourse of the late-nineteenth-century United States. She analyzes how scientists naturalized racial difference and socio-political exclusion by insisting that the bodies of racial minorities were not fully male or female.36 This relationship between science and its shifting uses of sex and gender to denote racial difference can be seen with the self-writing practices of the four writers. Scientific accounts of racial difference gained their efficacy through the professionalization of scientific discourse in the late-nineteenth-century. As much as science proved to be an important factor in disseminating racial difference and, thereby, racialized identities, popular culture helped to reproduce and reify racial difference. Werther wrote in his Autobiography, for instance, about plantation songs he sang cruising through the streets of New York City. Bly’s spectacular stunt-reporting for the New York World would not have been possible without her travel story to Mexico. Through her ethnicized and racialized descriptions of Mexicans, she could distance herself from the male journalists at home, while
35 “Louis Althusser,” Last modified May 4, 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/althusser/ “This account of how a human being becomes a self-conscious subject was published in an essay titled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970). It was excerpted from a larger essay titled “On the Reproduction of Capitalism.” This work analyzed the necessary relationship between state and subject such that a given economic mode of
production might subsist. It includes not only an analysis of the state and its legal and educational systems, but also of the psychological relationship which exists between subject and state as ideology.”
36 Melissa N. Stein, Measuring Manhood, Race and the Science of Masculinity 1830 1934 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
at the same time operating with the same racialized speech acts that shaped journalistic endeavors to a certain degree back at home in the United States. Johnson used the classic genre of the novel, which was predominantly male and white, to establish an unnamed protagonist, the Ex-Colored Man, heightening “our attention to the imbrications of these two discursive processes” of gender identification as well as race.37 The preparation of an impersonation of a Native American leader from the seventeenth century, Miantonomoh, as described in Welling’s diaries, produced a one-dimensional representation of Native American manhood that masked the ruthless treatment of Native Americans. In addition to the efficacies of the categories gender and race, the interrelatedness of other categories of difference – for example, class, religion, and (dis-)ability – will be focused on as well. As mentioned above, differences were shaped by scientific discourse, and popular culture, but also influenced, shaped, produced and contested by everyday practices of individuals. The self-writing practice analyzed here will, therefore, extend to other fields in which the medico- legal reasoning of the doings and sayings of individuals are dispersed.
Writing, and the circumjacent practices of walking, reading, and watching, are necessary tools to evaluate, process, and constantly negotiate an identity. This negotiation process was deeply entrenched with contemporary ideas and perceptions of class, race, gender, age, (dis-)ability, and religion. The many identity processes this study follows in the analysis of the four writers’ texts indicated being constantly different from the ideas of discursively fixed categories such as man and woman, as one example. Being different from discursively fixed gendered categories is intertwined with racialized and classified categories, evoking the rich history of difference, ranging from Audre Lorde’s theory of difference to Chela Sandoval’s differential consciousness and Jacques Derrida’s work on différance.
Despite evoking dissimilar located circuits of signification, they are linkable by the fact that all “these different paradigms attempt to catalog sites of emergence,” as Muñoz points out by quoting Norma Alarćon. Alarćon synthesizes the aforementioned works by employing the idea of the identity-in-difference paradox.38 When queers, queer bodies39 are “locked out of
37 C. Riley Snorton, “Passing for White, Passing for Man, Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as Transgender Narrative,” in Transgender Migrations, The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, ed.
Trystan T. Cotten (New York: Routledge, 2012).
38 Norma Alarćon, “Conjugating Subjects in the Age of Multiculturalism,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed.
Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 129. Cited in:
Muñoz, Disidentifications, 7.
39 My understanding of queer bodies, of queerness refers to one of the founding texts of queer theory, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, an Introduction. It is a way of life formed by various subcultural practices, alternative forms of networks and friendships, and representations thereof that willfully encompass and produces alternative modes of being and thereby identifications.
the halls of representation,”40 how is it possible “to imagine a world where queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity?”41 Jose Esteban Muñoz posed this important question for queer contemporary bodies and their identity performances. This is a question that is also valid and useful in the historical setting of the fractured modern times of the late Gilded Age and the early Progressive Era, especially when looking at urban- centered, industrialist turn-of-the-century New York City, where queer bodies were prone to being deciphered as hysterical, neurasthenic, and degenerate, and where representation also meant inventing, categorizing, and structuring identities.
Writing and the Self
Self-writing, as Michel Foucault suggested, was part of the government of oneself and others in Greco-Roman culture. Taking notes, writing down the actions and impulses of the soul “as though we were to report them to each other,” and observation, all these elements “of writing in the philosophical cultivation of the self just before Christianity” were already to be found in Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius.42 In this depiction of what Foucault calls ethopoietic writing, the transformation of truth into ethos in the first two centuries is the overarching focus that was laid upon the practice of writing. For the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, and the Cynics, exercise (askesis), and the art of living (tekhne tou biou) were traditional principles and they had long attached a great importance to them. But although remnants of these Greco-Roman principles are, after almost two thousand years, to be found in the writings this study is concerned with, like the usage of surrounding practices reading, rereading, meditating, conversing with oneself and others, they do not constitute a “narrative of oneself.”43 More precisely, the narrative of oneself differed significantly from Greco- Roman culture, as indicated, for instance, by Thomas Augst in The Clerk’s Tale.44 The idea of realizing an ideal of one’s self was deeply entrenched within a culture in which traditional, aristocratic norms and patterns had lost its authority and meaning.
As a result, the practice of writing was connected to a historically specific conception of independency and masculinity. In the Gilded Age, writing, as much as other practices as well, came to be bound up with leisure and consumerism in a commercializing society. Definitions of masculinity shifted away from traditional anchors in work and economic achievement,
40 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 1.
41 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 1.
42 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (The New Press, New York 1997), 207-222.
43 Thomas Etzemüller, Biographien (Frankfurt: Campus, 2012): 128–29.
44 Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale, Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
leading to new ways of reintegrating masculinity. White Euro-Americans often depicted Anglo-Saxons as a superior race, postulating an exceptionalism and greatness of Anglo-Saxon nations, which emphasized a love for independency, freedom, and a capacity for self- government as desirable virtues in clear contrast to the virtue of aiskesis of Greco-Roman culture. As a result, writers in the late nineteenth century propelled – amongst all the economic upheavals, labor radicalism, and rising levels of immigration – an individualism never before seen. The practice of self-writing was thus reintegrating burgeoning values like character formation and the project of self-development. Whereas Augst analyzes diary writing by clerks as a distinctive group, I have analyzed four late-nineteenth-century writers that may only loosely be clustered as a group. Their self-writing practice was used as a tool to forge their own identities by writing diaries, books, articles, and letters. In contrast, for instance, to the diaries of young men, they encountered identificatory thresholds, as they were in various ways the antithesis of markers of manliness. They had to survive a hostile public sphere as androgyne, woman, and African American man, establishing a distinctive disidentification in their self-writings. The last chapter uncovers a reverse disidentification.
Within the last chapter on Welling, a white, Euro-American man and social reformer, his self- writing practice proved his masculinity in impersonating Miantonomoh, a man of an allegedly primitive race and thereby a ‘lesser man.’ Not unlike the practice of white minstrel performers in which “men stole song, speech, and gestures, of American slaves or free African Americans, to profit from turning black people into infantilized monsters of stupidity,”45 Welling acquired colonial knowledge by othering, which Homi Bhabha understands as an ambivalent act of love and subjection.46 Stereotypes of Native American customs and clothes were used by Welling to gain improved reputation, success, and visibility at a high-society ball, a distinctively exclusionary setting of an economic white elite in New York City.
The four writers in question followed neither an ethos of writing nor an art of living as a principle. Turn-of-the-century New York City was one of the economic centers of the Western hemisphere, and, thereby, every (dis-)identification through self-writing was shaped by a counterhegemonic artistic production within a capitalist society. This is one central differentiation between the practice of writing in the first two centuries of Greco-Roman culture and the practice of writing in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Self-writing thus follows a long line of thought and
45 Greil Marcus, “Foreword to the 20th – Anniversary Edition,“ in Eric Lott, Love and Theft, Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) XI.
46 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1994), 66-84; Annemarie Bean, “Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion, circa 1890,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, eds.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 171-91.
practice in Western culture, but rather than shaping a virtue and character, the practice of writing of the four authors focused on here was intertwined with the unspeakable, the hidden, the unsaid, and the not yet existing forms of subjectivities. Unlike Greco-Roman culture, turn- of-the-century New York City was a world where basic literacy skills were becoming standard and widespread in the nineteenth century. People were, moreover, socialized into a mass print culture that was shaped, as almost every other part of social life, by other virtues, namely the notions of self-control and self-government embedded within a distinctive Victorian ideal of what it meant to be a woman and a man, crystallized as will be seen in various tropes, such as the new woman and the self-made man.
Writing and New York City
At the end of the nineteenth century, there were not many places in the United States where one could be a writer by day and a female impersonator at night, where a woman could become a famous girl-stunt reporter, an African American man could pave his way to become a distinguished novelist, and a social reformer could make headlines with an ethnic drag impersonation. The four writers were all part of an urban space that gave way to the mediacy of such experiences. Urban guidebooks propelled an image of New York City as “a museum of wonders”47 with countless attractions, and with the exception of Chicago, no other city in this time period in United States conjured such connotations. As New York was one of the original thirteen colonies in America, it was founded as a hub of trade, and it still was an important place of transshipment. New York City had an important commercial exchange with the Old World, which led to a cultural blend – with diverse people, ethics, religions, habits, and tastes – seen almost nowhere else in the world. Yet, late-nineteenth-century American history was also a history of immigration, commercialization, segregation, and violence against Native Americans, African Americans, and countless others marked as non- Euro-American. Parallel to this history a narrative was shaped and enfolded: that of the land of opportunities. It had spread throughout the country and the world, and within this narrative, at the same time as lived realities and histories of Native Americans and African Americans were being erased, New York City became the gateway to an abundance of possibilities.
Cities are built with language, or, to put it another way, with writings, texts, and maps.
In the early 1880s, commentators on New York “began to note the upward tendency of its architecture and the innovation of electricity which illuminated Broadway, from Union Square to Thirty-fourth Street, with the radiance of day.”48 Whether it was the changing
47 S.S. Colt, The Tourist’s Guide through the Empire State (Albany 1871), 4.
48 Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: Fordham University Press, 1956), 205.
